Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Babbling about 90s TV

Especially since finals are coming up. I've also been watching a lot of Earth Final Conflict with Ragnell and Mario.

It's my favorite 90's Canadian Sci-Fi show (um, 5th season didn't happen) ever. And really, you gotta love anything that's first season ends with an alien+human three-way in a Catholic Church and just goes on from there.

Also Howard Chaykin writes some episodes and you can totally tell. (Lots of women in underwear shooting things. :-P) But he's actually a pretty good fit.

Moreover, the advantage to having a hyperaged infant main character, besides all the bad taste jokes about the baby's alcoholism, anorexia, and the frequency of occasions of psychic pedophilia, is that he's pretty much unavailable for all but the most innocent of romantic subplots, so by the third and fourth season the main female character pulls double weight there. Yay for thinly veiled bisexuality!

And of course, the aliens are just awesome. (Though people who deny that the Taelons are villains confuse the hell out of me. They're COOL villains, sure. Interesting and even sympathetic. But...pretty much villains from episode one. The premise of the show is basically "Take First Contact, but this time the Vulcans are lying.")

And season 2 is finally coming out on DVD in Canada! That makes me very happy! <3

EFC was a bit hard to take the first time around, especially the first season, which seemed to freely adopt its plots from the Grand List of Overused Sci-Fi Cliches. But it found its stride when Boone and Marquette were replaced by Kincaid and Palmer--far more fun and appealing leads.

I was personally a big Agent Sandoval fan and his treacherous relationship with Zo'or. Von Flores seemed to show up in every production that was filming in Toronto in the 90s, including a notable supporting role in the cheesy but self-aware masked-vigilante film Model by Day (starring Famke Jansen and written by Jeph Loeb--worth checking out for a lark), but in EFC he avoided being typecast as an Asian gangster, and we got the great character of Sandoval out of it.

I like all four seasons for different reasons. Though Liam's probably my favorite character (I have a thing for part-alien hyperaged infants who need therapy and a sandwich?)

I liked Renee a lot until they completely massacred her characterization in that season that doesn't exist as far as I'm concerned. ;-)

I definitely agree that Sandoval is an awesome character. Heck, Von Flores was the whole reason I started watching the show. Well, him and Lisa Howard. ("Wait, is that Anne from Highlander and Sonny Hokori...I'm vaguely intrigued.") I always felt cheated that he never got the reverse-Darth Vader reveal scene he deserved.